Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 eBook

LETTER VIII

C. DARWIN TO A.R. WALLACE

Down, Bromley, Kent. May 18, 1860.

My dear Mr. Wallace,—­I received this morning
your letter from Amboyna dated Feb. 16th, containing
some remarks and your too high approbation of my book.
Your letter has pleased me very much, and I most completely
agree with you on the parts which are strongest and
which are weakest. The imperfection of the geological
record is, as you say, the weakest of all; but yet
I am pleased to find that there are almost more geological
converts than of pursuers of other branches of natural
science. I may mention Lyell, Ramsay, Jukes,
Rogers, Keyerling, all good men and true. Pictet
of Geneva is not a convert, but is evidently staggered
(as I think is Bronn of Heidelberg), and he has written
a perfectly fair review in the Bib. Universelle
of Geneva. Old Bronn has translated my book,
well done also into German, and his well-known name
will give it circulation. I think geologists
are more converted than simple naturalists because
more accustomed to reasoning.

Before telling you about the progress of opinion on
the subject, you must let me say how I admire the
generous manner in which you speak of my book:
most persons would in your position have felt bitter
envy and jealousy. How nobly free you seem to
be of this common failing of mankind. But you
speak far too modestly of yourself; you would, if you
had had my leisure, have done the work just as well,
perhaps better, than I have done it. Talking
of envy, you never read anything more envious and
spiteful (with numerous misrepresentations) than Owen
is in the Edinburgh Review. I must give
one instance; he throws doubts and sneers at my saying
that the ovigerous frena of cirripedes have been converted
into branchiae, because I have not found them to be
branchiae; whereas he himself admits, before
I wrote on cirripedes, without the least hesitation,
that their organs are branchiae. The attacks have
been heavy and incessant of late. Sedgwick and
Prof. Clarke attacked me savagely at the Cambridge
Philosophical Society, but Henslow defended me well,
though not a convert. Phillips has since attacked
me in a lecture at Cambridge; Sir W. Jardine in the
Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, Wollaston
in the Annals of Nat. History, A. Murray
before the Royal Soc. of Edinburgh, Haughton at the
Geological Society of Dublin, Dawson in the Canadian
Nat. Magazine, and many others.
But I am getting case-hardened, and all these attacks
will make me only more determinedly fight. Agassiz
sends me personal civil messages, but incessantly
attacks me; but Asa Gray fights like a hero in defence.
Lyell keeps as firm as a tower, and this autumn will
publish on the Geological History of Man, and will
then declare his conversion, which now is universally